Search Results

Growing your following as a food blogger Hi! This post is about @shereshe. She creates food videos. It's one of my favorite Instagram accounts. She created a series and ate her way through the alphabet in India She piggybacks off of the most popular cuisines of India. Wraps it in a series format since there are 26 alphabets. And it got really popular. Indians would watch because there's of the curiosity gap, even if what she shares could be obvious, people would still watch. She shares history and culture — things even I don't know — and exceeds expectations. Tourists would be interested because this creates somewhat of a guided travel. I don't think that she's re-inventing the wheel. She isn't creating each recipe on her own, or trying to find interesting restaurants. Nope. She's just taking what works well, and resonates with an audience. She's piggybacking off of the popularity of the Alphonso Mango. A fruit's popularity. Wrapping it up in a series so it increases retention and creates a habit loop. Pretty clever. Always find a horse to ride. Never market alone. 🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴

Hi! I'm Khushi. I've paid for Growthmentor for nearly 15 months. And I've had over 30ish calls so far I got some nice feedback too. I hope the above context helps shine some light, that I've really used the growthmentor platform. Here's what I think of GrowthMentor and whether I will continue to pay for it: There are a few alternatives out there for mentorship but most feel very dry and transactional. Growthmentor doesn't feel dry and transactional. That kind of atmosphere is tough to create but they've nailed it. It's pricey! Especially if you don't use it. So, I usually have an on-and-off subscription. If I know, I'll need stuff in the future, I'll pay up. It's not super easy to book mentors but still easier than cold outreach. I usually invest 30-40 minutes to book each call. This involves research (who do I talk to?), and pitching them to talk to me. There's also a help request section. You put your help requests and mentors will apply to help you out. This worked better than my expectations Hidden benefits of Growthmentor Growthmentor introduced me to lots of people in the industry . So I'm not a small fish in a small pond. Foti (founder) introduced to me to someone who was hiring when I was early in my career looking for jobs. I was able to stay in touch with this person even after I ended my subscription, and they introduced me to lots of new opportunities. I've taken 60+ online courses but practical advice/feedback is invaluable. Today, whenever I have a problem I'm working on, I try to solicit feedback. Try to discover what it is that I don't know. And why my work might suck. It's working out really well! Growthmentor Review I think its money well spent. And I'll continue to pay for it. Although, I will pause/and reactivate my subscription and as when I can actually make use of it. My recommendation: Try for a month/or three. Give it your best shot. If it works for you, it can act as a huge catalyst in your career. If it doesn't, think of it as a bad investment and write it off.

Oreo has a 78% brand awareness in the USA. But this wasn't always the case. Brands aren't born with a high market penetration. Nope. So, how did Oreo make this happen? Besides their awesome moment marketing . Oreo piggybacked on one of the most successful campaigns of all time — the Got Milk? campaign A short history of the got milk? campaign The California's Dairy Processors were concerned. Milk demand was falling each year. So the non-profit decided to pool in a total of $20 million dollars and recruit a marketing agency to drive up the overall demand for milk. The agency did market research and found these insights: The 'milk is good for health' messaging wasn't resonating. Messaging had to be intellectual. You had to tell people the truth. Milk was always consumed with other products like 'milk and cereal', or 'milk and chocolate chip cookies'. Milk wasn't the hero, the other product was. It was more like 'cereal and milk' or 'chocolate chip cookie and milk". These were 'trigger moments' in people's lives that could remind them of milk . People don't like to run out of milk. There are certain things in life you appreciate more when you don't have it. Milk was one these. They ran a classic deprivation marketing strategy. Now known as "got milk?". Eventually, got milk? hit the jackpot. People started coining their own phrases like "Got beer?" or "Got cupcakes". Got Milk? asked Oreo out first. When Got Milk? rose to fame, their agency decided to do a co-marketing campaign with the other complementary products. Oreo being one of them. But then, Oreo never let milk get away. Oreo created a new tagline "Milk's Favorite Cookie" to piggyback on the popularity of milk consumption. These trigger moments are important because every time people think of milk, they should think of Oreo. They kept this slogan for years. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need to create your own incredibly successful "Got Milk?" campaign. Try to find one that is already successful, and see if you can piggyback on theirs instead. Oreo found another horse to ride — all desserts People now use Oreo as an ingredient instead of simply treating it just as a cookie eaten separately. This drives up the volume per capita for Oreo, and it adds a lot of trigger moments. Imagine seeing an Oreo Cheesecake, Oreo Milkshake, Oreo Kunafa, literally on every dessert menu. This is an insane amount of free publicity and marketing touchpoints. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need to piggyback forever. Once they help you get to your destination, you can pick another horse to ride Applying these lessons to your business Find trigger moments that people use with your product. For example, Streamline (a graphic assets pre-made library) is used in Figma. Yours could be a product that is used with Shopify. Next, find ways to piggyback. For example, it could doing generic stuff like creating templates, plugins, or getting featured in awards. Or it could be something much wild and creative. Finally, see if you really have to partner with them or can you piggyback without it. After you piggyback, re-evaluate if you need the partner or need a new partner. If you want to extend the ROI of your piggybacking investment, try to make sure it's a win-win for both parties. The host and the guest. Let me know if you have more questions in the comments below and we can brain-write together. This post is inspired by Tagline's podcast . Opinions above are all my own and not of Tagline. Best, Khushi

Lyft is an on-demand ride-sharing startup. Like Uber, if that exists where you live. Drivers onboarding other drivers (+) Early in the process, they micromanaged market launches. A Lyft staff member interviewed all drivers. This was good for the first few markets, but it meant their ability to launch new markets was slow and constrained. Then they launched a ⭐ ‘mentoring’ ⭐ process, which allowed drivers to train newly onboarded drivers, through the Lyft Driver App itself—the trainee’s first ‘ping’ would be the mentor requesting to train them, and they’d go through a ride-esque experience to meet up with them. This allowed them to launch 24 markets in a single day , in one fell swoop, something that would have been unimaginable months earlier. Quality might take a hit, as a tradeoff (-) Like the Ride Share Guy pointed out, " it seems like most mentors are more concerned with rushing through the session than doing a great job", it's hard to scale while keeping quality consistent. That's a tradeoff to account for with this method of piggybacking. Piggybacking Takeaway 🐷 You don't need external sources to piggyback. Sometimes they exist within your company. If you have a marketplace, you can use your own marketplace to piggyback. If it's not a marketplace, you can piggyback on your employees like Gmail did. Piggybacking on marketplaces may not always be defensible, or easy to manage. I appreciate the read. Curious to hear what you think in the comments below or anywhere else you'd feel comfortable sharing. Here's a cute doggo for extra good luck on your day today. Source: Facts come from Lenny's Newsletter . Opinions are my own. I don't do a lot of research since I'm just trying to match patterns about piggybacking as a concept, so I may have drawn incorrect conclusions.

It was a wild ride. I took the altMBA program by Akimbo and Seth Godin in Jan, 2022. 100ish people from all walks of life made up my cohort 100 people are split in four cohorts, 25 each. Every week, they'll shuffle you around with new people in your cohort with whom you will discuss three prompts. The 13 altMBA prompts help develop soft skills and are on topics like: Goal-setting Business modeling Decision making Empathy & worldviews Building culture Intentionality Marketing methods Gaining buy-in Public Speaking Leading through ambiguity Strategy & critical thinking Giving and receiving feedback Having difficult conversations No, Seth Godin doesn't show up for the altMBA Seth Godin founded altMBA. But I don't think he is affiliated with them anymore. For me, this was the biggest bummer. I spoke to a friend who took the program and Seth showed up for their commencement ceremony. But for my batch 'altMBA54', he didn't. And it makes sense. Read what is written on Seth's blog "I’m the founder of Akimbo, home of the altMBA . These are the most effective learning opportunities I know of. Akimbo is now an independent B Corp , owned and run by the team" So, Seth isn't actively involved anymore. Just an FYI in case you speak to someone who graduated before the 54th cohort i.e. Feb, 2022 batch. The real cost of altMBA altMBA pricing: It costs $4,950. They seem to have increased the tuition from $4,450 to $4,950. Tbh, it's is pretty expensive compared to other educational programs I've taken before, ranging from $39/month to $2000/year. Time commitment ⌛ Takes 20 hours/per week. Some folks spent more; others spent far less. Mental commitment 🫠 It did break me down a couple of times because I had to face my fears. Family commitment 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🐕 The old African proverb “If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate village” held true. I brought my family along for the journey, teaching them what I had learned. Oral narration not only helped me better store this in my memory. AltMBA friends commitment 👯‍♀️ At times I had trouble navigating in and out of my newly developed altMBA personality so some of my friends didn't like this new change. Apparently, friends don't like when you become more polite. /s My confession To be honest, I never fully understood what the altMBA would teach me until the first day of school. If you're wondering why I still enrolled, I had two reasons: 1️⃣ I hit an inflection point in my career: People wanted to give me more leadership opportunities, but I was hesitant to take them up. I was hesitant if I could rally people around well enough. So I turned down the opportunity. I had plenty of hard skills but lacked the competency to lead effectively. 2️⃣ I also chase sunsets and have ridiculously high ambitions I asked someone who won the Forbes 30 under 30 award what did she do to win it. Her advice for me was to find people I want to emulate and trace back their path. Have enough sample size, and map my plan. "Find 50+ LinkedIn profiles of Head of Growth and analyze what was their path: roles, skills, courses, awards, public activities, etc". So I did just that. I set up an Airtable. And AltMBA came up way too often. Those two reasons were enough for me to say yes. A thorny altMBA review Every rose has its thorns. The altMBA is not flawless but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 🌹 I'll share three things with you: 🙂The good stuff 😖 The stuff they could definitely improve on 🤔 Dated experience once I'm past the honeymoon phase. I'll share how I feel about the altMBA 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from today. My altMBA review: 6 awesome things 👋🏽 Community driven With the altMBA, I had the chance to spend 20+ hours with each of the 15-20 in my learning groups. These were people at the top of their game, with decades of work experience. 💬 Learned thoughtful and intentional messaging I've realized that sometimes hitting backspace is more important than hitting the keys. Nowadays, I try to think more deeply before I hit send, and I find that things like 'curiosity' and 'empathy' really make a difference. I feel like I've gotten better at giving feedback and framing my sentences in a way that people resonate with. Wondering what should I do with my typing speed 🥲 🙋🏽‍♀️ Learned how to ask better questions After the altMBA, I've become more empathetic when I'm talking to people. It's become easier to motivate people when you're asking the right questions. I used to think I had to draft instructions to get things done, but now I've found that asking questions and helping them come up with their own solutions is way more effective. 👩‍🏫 altMBA comes with on-demand coaches You'll have two coaches dedicated to your cohort. You'll get one piece of feedback from on your prompts. On top of that, you can schedule a personalized call with any of them. I used my call to talk more about figuring out my leadership style. I'd strongly recommend making use of these calls. 🙇‍♀️ I got so much better at receiving feedback. Receiving feedback is a life-skill. Even better when you have to actively seek out feedback. Small mindset change, but is really helpful for my career. The book "Thanks for the feedback", a part of the reading list at altMBA, was pretty good. 🎁 The altMBA will send a welcome package your way. This was really special. I could post a picture but don't want to ruin any surprises. Is the altMBA worth it? Here are a few things I think they could improve upon: 1. altMBA is too self-serve I had submitted 13 prompts and received only one feedback per prompt from coaches, with the remaining four feedbacks coming from fellow students. It was as if we were all left to our own devices. While the approach of students discussing prompts, writing answers, and giving feedback to each other has its merits, I would have appreciated more guidance from the team. It would have been helpful to have a coach walk me through the feedback I gave others, offer suggestions for improvement, and show me how to better receive feedback. 2. altMBA gives no lifetime access A few weeks after graduation, the program material will no longer accessible to us, which was somewhat disappointing. Additionally, our Slack channel would be deleted within a week. Perhaps there could have been more emphasis placed on maintaining access to these resources beyond graduation. Rather than having each student spend several hours exporting stuff from the platform, which to me is a waste of man hours. 3. altMBA has poor networking after the cohort ends. After deleting Slack, we are all asked to join a Facebook group with the broader altMBA network. I don't use Facebook, and many Gen Z and millennials have switched over to Tiktok and Instagram for their. It seems like the wrong place to build a business community. If I want to find out who's working for Canva in Europe, for example, it's not a particularly efficient process. It should've either been Slack or at least LinkedIn if they couldn't code their own platform. And the numbers speak. People aren't joining this FB group. The AltMBA alumni FB group has 2.6k members whereas their website says there are 5,000 alumni. On the other hand, Reforge handles this so much better - it allows me to search for anyone based on their job title, industry, name, company, or business model and get results in just a few seconds. Plus, with the ability to DM them right in our Slack group in just one click, it feels much more streamlined and efficient. ShiftNudge, which is a cohort based design course, also handles it much better. Even though it's a one-person team. You have one Slack channel for your cohort, and the others are for prompts. All ShiftNudge students stay in one Slack workspace and you can hop in and out of channels that are relevant to you. 4. altMBA's calendar sharing system was quite outdated I had to add the entire calendar manually. And it didn't book my calendar, which means I could get double booked. To avoid this, I had to duplicate events one by one or use Zapier. Moreover, some events weren't even added to the calendar, causing a few friends to miss out on all of them. I recommended some third-party tools that makes adding to calendars as easy as a single click and hopefully, the altMBA team incorporates this feedback. 5. You won't meeting everyone in the altMBA You'll meet 12-16 people during your time at the altMBA. You don't interact with everyone. altMBA reddit and other reviews Take my opinion with a grain of salt. Here's feedback from around the internet: CJHoss when asked if altMBA worth it: "For education on topics taught in business school, mostly yes. To help you land a new job, make a career pivot, build your professional network, that’s a big no." John Rau : For me, Seth Godin’s altMBA was worth it. However not all my classmates felt the same. Some considered it too “culty,” others found it an unrealistic time commitment, some thought it was too expensive, and others said they didn’t learn anything. David Richards : The primary reason I feel it was not worth it for me, was because I am addicted to Seth Godin. So a number of the workshops in the course were covering things I had already done. So I feel I wasn’t exposed to much I hadn’t already been exposed to. Also, lots of people in my batch loved the altMBA and wanted to bring it to their entire team. So, there's definitely an upside. If you're still on the fence, just get on a call with their team to understand what it would really entail. altMBA books and reading list AltMBA will send you a bunch of books which you can find here and they also share plenty of articles to read. I'm still trying to find the article that has links to each of these resources. If you find it, please let me know so I can link it. altMBA Scholarship The altMBA has an incredible scholarship program. If you're unhappy with the scholarship offer you've received, request to through a second interview and explain your situation. altMBA Free Download Downloading the altMBA isn't really fun. The real magic is in the community and the discussions you have with your learning groups. You're constantly receiving feedback, and are giving feedback. Downloading a set of 13 prompts will be futile. altMBA has a fair use policy which I doubt anyone would disrespect. altMBA Alternatives Read a lot of philosophy books. They'll teach you a lot of what altMBA seeks to teach without the human interaction. It should still work because I shared altMBA learnings with my brother who said he already learned all of this from his philosophy books. Build your own learning groups, where you journal together. I don't think it's the same as an MBA since it teaches soft skills and no hard skills. An altMBA won't pass off as an MBA. It's sort of a condensed mix of self-help books put into a simulator. The End I was able to recoup my investment, so it ended up being a great decision. Awesome to know that you're reading this review and being wise with your choices.

Duolingo's onboarding with a fun twist. I work as a growth lead, and my work is a venn diagram between design, growth, and marketing. This leaves me in a very unique position to balance acquisition needs, design decisions, and retention tradeoffs. 🥵 App Install Page Splash Screen Delayed Sign Up Screen Onboarding: What's your goal? Onboarding: Loading Screen Onboarding: Attribution Question Onboarding: Why do you have a goal? Onboarding: Summarize benefits Onboarding: Setup habit loop Onboarding: Allow Notifications Onboarding: Segment power users Onboarding: Social proof Onboarding: Launch product Onboarding: Ask for email Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi Lunkad Resources used to create this: Pageflows (screenshots), Growth.design (comic style), Neurofied (biases)

Netflix Onboarding with a fun twist I work as a growth marketing and growth product lead, and my work is a Venn diagram between design, growth, and marketing. This leaves me in a very unique position to balance acquisition needs, design decisions, and retention tradeoffs. Two things Netflix does right Adds filler pages. Auto-upgrades people to a reverse trial if they choose a cheaper plan. Thanks for reading! I plan to write more cases and would love a favor. Can you DM me or leave a comment below (no sign up needed) with what you liked / didn't like? I'm just trying to improve. Thank you! Best, Khushi Lunkad Resources used to create this: Pageflows (screenshots), Growth.design (comic style), Neurofied (biases)

Hey there, I'm Khushi, and I lead growth and marketing at Streamline . We're a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that serves designers. I joined Streamline two years ago as the first marketing and growth hire, and now we're used by most Fortune 500 companies, and we even won the Best Graphic Resource Award in 2022! Core Values At Streamline, our core values are centered around getting marketing right with designers, who are some of the most joyful, friendly, and empathetic people I know. They love life and their craft, so it's important that our marketing communication matches their fun-loving nature. Tips for Marketing to Designers Here are some tips that might help if you're marketing to designers: Keep your communication kind and joyful. Avoid being too direct or tactical. Share inspiration of what other people have created with your product. Designers' Characteristics Designers have high design expectations, so improving your website or app design is essential. But they're not demanding, at least not in my experience. When they make product suggestions, they do it kindly and offer feedback constructively. They're smart and can tell when someone's trying to trick them. They're generous and willing to give credit where it's due. They have an on-and-off need for products if they're freelancers. So make sure your churn flow accounts for natural churn. Conclusion I plan on building on this article over time, so if you're interested, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter below.

Starbucks ran a BOGO deal disguised as referral campaign Instead of the usual buy 1 get one offer, they encouraged people to bring a friend along. I want to discuss the untapped potential of Starbucks' disguised referral program. Getting a friend means bringing anyone — your boss, parents or even your ex. This gives people more possibilities to invite people. Instead of running a traditional, boring BOGO scheme, Starbucks turned it into a referral marketing campaign at scale. There were a few advantages New user activation Resurrection of a churned user Building habit loops for existing users and driving up loyalty Maximizing reach through influencer partnerships And Starbucks promoted the offer via influencer marketing, because distribution is everything. Did Starbucks Miss Out on Retaining New Customers? But I wasn't sure if they'd retain these newly acquired users. It wasn't clear from their campaign. So I went to Starbucks on the 7th of May to figure out what they'd do to retain new customers and drive up repeat purchases. Surprisingly, they were doing nothing. 🤔 We went in. Paid cash. Had the coffee. And we left. First impressions matter: Starbucks' overcrowding problem It was so crowded and people had to queue up outside the store in order to be let in. This was clearly not the kind of experience what Starbucks stands for — and why people pay for. So, it'd be harder to retain first-time visitors who have a sub-optimal experience. Missed opportunities to close the referral loop On the surface, I couldn't find any initiatives that were meant to close the referral loop. So I went to look more closely and I found some. 1. There were coupons printed out There was a pamphlet that could be used as a discount code. There was a time limit to redeem to get people into the habit. It looks like bi-monthly is the natural frequency that Starbucks is aiming to nurture users into. But it wasn't placed in a way where customers could see it. It was next to the cashier but was facing the baristas. The baristas didn't even give it to me when I placed the order, nor when I collected my order. The reason why this coupon is important is so that they'd nurture habit building and bring users the second time in the store. 2. Starbucks Card Starbucks also has a card system that requires you to load ₹ 200 before making your first purchase. In our case, it was possible to get our ₹ 400 order for ₹ 190 if we had loaded the card beforehand. However, we were rushed through the queue and didn't notice this option, nor did the baristas mention it. If we had used the card, Starbucks would have had our email or phone number to try and win us back if they noticed we were not returning. Additionally, we would have had ₹ 10 left in our account to spend. Oh and unfortunately, one of the offers on the page was no longer valid, so it was wasting our attention without providing anything in return, adding to our cognitive load. Conclusion In my opinion, Starbucks did a great job. One key takeaway for companies running buy 1 get 1 offers is to consider running them as give 1 get 1 offers. Additionally, it's important to actively promote good offers rather than relying on users to discover them on their own. Starbucks relied on influencer marketing to do so. Yes, they missed some opportunities to keep me engaged, like promoting the 25% discount more prominently or incentivizing new users to invite more friends. They could also streamline the Starbucks card creation process to prevent baristas from discouraging customers. Despite these issues, I'm certain Starbucks will consider this a successful campaign and will continue to refine it to generate even more revenue in the future. Thanks for reading my take! I write them to add to my swipe file and to remember it when the time comes.

Index Good landing pages examples My test with Framer Framer CMS tutorial (text-based) Framer CMS tutorial (video-based) SEO landing pages are better than blogs Veed has these landing pages that drive more traffic than all of its blog posts combined. See the traffic on SEMRush. 168k monthly visitors just from a handful of pages. SmallPDF also has similar landing pages. And each of these pages bring in millions of visits each month. Look at /edit-pdf driving 1.8M monthly visits! These landing pages are fairly simple to create compared compared to blog posts. I was able to create 20 of these in a few hours. Veed has a simple CTA that directs people to the main product. Veed also uses deeplinks to improve the UX and ranking. SmallPDF has an embed right within the landing page that people can interact with. My successful test with Framer I launched a quick and dirty test and let it simmer. It was something I did without a developer or a designer. Even with hardly any effort or any real optimization, you can see that it's growing in the right direction. It's also bringing paid conversions. A Framer tutorial for marketers Framer is a real competitive advantage so I created a little tutorial guide below if you wanted to check it out. I re-created Veed's landing page in Framer but you'd just have to copy/paste your Figma components in Framer. It's easier than you think. Then, create a simple landing page. It's a drag and drop editor, just like Figma. You can duplicate and create as many as landing pages as you want. I recommend creating 20 variations to test with and understand which performs. After you know what's working, you can convert a single landing page into a CMS template. A Framer CMS template lets you edit the content but the structure remains the same. Traditional CMS platforms make it easier to write blogs but to create landing pages, you need to go to a dev. Framer changes this status quo. You can duplicate pages in Framer's CMS just as easily. Framer CMS Pricing: On their basic tier ($15), you can create one CMS template, and on their premium tier ($25), you can create ten. In my opinion, Framer should have allowed everyone to use CMS for free, even if they prompted an upgrade pop-up when publishing the site. Restricting people from using the feature makes it harder to discover. However, I do not have enough knowledge about their product to comment. It could also be that the CMS is still underdeveloped and leads to churn if people see it. 🤷‍♀️ Scaling it up even further If you wish to scale it up to hundreds of posts, you can upload a CSV file to Framer, and it will auto-populate the data. You can use either ChatGPT (instruct it to output as a table) or Google Spreadsheet's OpenAI integration. Video tutorial for Framer landing pages and CMS Learn to create SEO landing pages with Framer in 5 minutes. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso The status quo for SaaS products is onboarding. But most onboarding funnels add more friction than they seek to remove. And if activation is your goal, there's only so many steps or friction that you can remove. At Streamline, we provide icons and illustrations. People can browse, customize, and export as many assets as they want. And it's not just the web app that is ungated. Our Figma and Lucid plugins as well as our desktop app is ungated or has open funnels. There's literally no barrier to using the product. Humble beginnings.. A indie-maker created a zip file with some icons. It went viral. People asked for more. And the indie maker turned into a full-blown company. After I joined, Streamline moved from a transactional based business model to a subscription based model. People had to sign up to use the free product back then. Streamline's current onboarding.. Check out our onboarding: 1. You land on the icons homepage with all free sets at the top 2. You click into a set 3. You customize colors and size before exporting in the format you want. 4. And that's it. No watermarks. No low-resolution images. No signup needed. No account. No credit card. No questionnaire. Note: We do ask users to attribute to us if they use for free. The free tier is generous enough for most users and acts us our growth loop to generate high quality backlinks. The good stuff of open funnels.. People experience the product without friction and are delighted because it delivers on what they were hoping to get. One big benefit for us is via programmatic SEO. The more time people spend on the page, Google rewards us and ranks us higher. Activation explodes because there are no onboarding steps that lead to drop offs. Everyone skipped the line. More product data, perhaps 10x more than what'd you'd see with a traditional gated experience. This helps us understand which searches have no relevant results and if some icon sets convert better than the others. More users to run experiments. Instead of relying simply on homepage A/B testing, we now have more users in the product. The not-so-good stuff of frictionless onboarding.. Tracking is extremely hard. You have to stitch pre-login and post-login data together. If your audience is tech-savvy, you have to invest in server-side tracking to bypass adblockers that block client-side. Around 40-60% of devs, designers and tech-savvy people have ad blockers turned on. Users once lost are lost forever. If you fail to activate a user, you can't hope to win them back via onboarding emails. Lifecycle campaigns won't cover up for an average product experience. You're setting up users to fail. Some users require more hand-holding or your product has complex features that you can't just let people explore on their own. No sunk costs to keep users invested. It's easy to quit and make another search on google. Conversion rates will be lower because more people explore the product. In a traditional setup, these people would've dropped off already in an onboarding. No segmentation data. Onboarding usually helps to get information around industry, company size, role, traffic source, etc. And without one, your cohort analysis capabilities are limited. No user data means harder to qualify users or pipe them into sales funnels. You can't even customize the emails based on what their role / jbtd is about. You can customize only based on what you've seen them use. To get people to sign up, you'd have give away even more value. We layered on a free trial to get people to sign up. At the end of the day, you have good friction and bad friction. You have to choose whether to keep both or remove both. Thanks for reading :) Khushi Lunkad

Hi, I'm Khushi, and I lead the growth and marketing efforts at Streamline. Streamline is an icon and illustration library with a generous free tier. In fact, our free tier is even more generous than the paid tiers of some of our competitors! The story of Streamline Streamline's founder released an open-source UI icon set consisting of over a thousand icons. This set achieved tremendous success and eventually led him to achieve financial independence. Lots of backlinks According to SEMRush, Streamline has nearly 100k backlinks, and Ahrefs rates our domain with a score of 76. Open-source products typically ask users to provide a backlink when they use the product. Open-source strategy For any successful business, two key elements are necessary: an audience and a revenue strategy. By creating a (good!) open-source product, you can effectively address the first part of the equation. It's important to note that "free" and "open-source" are different concepts. Freemium models offer some free features but place restrictions, while open-source provides everything possible and more. Solving revenue Generating revenue becomes more challenging when users' needs are already met with a free product. Moreover, Streamline is not the only open-source product available in the market. Companies like Google and IBM are also competing for the same market share. The history and the future We observe an increasing number of companies developing a defensible strategy based on open-source. If the paid product focuses on managed services while the free product is self-hosted, an open-source offering effectively discourages newcomers from entering the market. Examples : Red Hat: For a long time, Red Hat sold services for open-source software and scaled it with human resources. Hadoop: The paid tier had more intellectual property than the open-source product, but scalability was challenging due to imperfect user experience. between the two products. Streamline: Streamline represents a third-generation open-source software. It builds differentiated intellectual property around the open-source core and offers differentiated open-core software as a service. (I use "open-core" because that's the most commonly used term to refer to Streamline). People pay for more than just support, as they gain access to the Figma plugin, Lucid plugin, a desktop app, and ten times more icons than the free tier provides. Distribution-first, not product-first Although this viewpoint may be controversial, I believe more founders should consider a distribution-first strategy rather than a product-first strategy. At the very least, this approach ensures that your company won't fizzle out in the early stages. Take Netflix as an example—its biggest growth driver is the fact that it comes pre-installed in set-top boxes. By solving the distribution aspect, you can buy time and gather more user feedback, which is essential for success! Thank you for reading! Disclaimer: Opinions, insights and everything is pretty much mine. So, take it with a grain of salt!